My Life on the Road

Gloria Steinem - writer, activist, organizer, and one of the most inspiring leaders in the world - now tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of how her early years led her to live an on-the-road kind of life, traveling, listening to people, learning, and creating change. She reveals the story of her own growth in tandem with the growth of an ongoing movement for equality. This is the story at the heart of My Life on the Road.

Small Great Things: A Novel

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with more than 20 years' experience. During her shift, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, who is African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders, or does she intervene?

Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness

Mindfulness—the art of paying attention with openness and curiosity to the present moment—has attracted ever-growing interest and tens of thousands of practitioners. This uniquely accessible guide provides a scientific explanation for how mindfulness positively and powerfully affects the brain and body, as well as practical guidance.

The Trespasser: A Novel

Being on the murder squad is nothing like Detective Antoinette Conway dreamed it would be. Her partner, Stephen Moran, is the only person who seems glad she's there. The rest of her working life is a stream of thankless cases, vicious pranks, and harassment. Antoinette is savagely tough, but she's getting close to the breaking point. Their new case looks like yet another by-the-numbers lovers' quarrel gone bad. Aislinn Murray is blond, pretty, groomed to a shine, and dead in her catalogue-perfect living room, next to a table set for a romantic dinner.

Between the World and Me

"This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race", a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men.

A Fighting Chance

As a child in small-town Oklahoma, Elizabeth Warren yearned to go to college and then become an elementary school teacher - an ambitious goal, given her family’s modest means. Early marriage and motherhood seemed to put even that dream out of reach, but 15 years later she was a distinguished law professor with a deep understanding of why people go bankrupt. Then came the phone call that changed her life: could she come to Washington, DC, to help advise Congress on rewriting the bankruptcy laws?

Zero K

Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to lives of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos: A Novel

In 1631, Sara de Vos is admitted as a master painter to the Guild of St. Luke's in Holland, the first woman to be so recognized. Three hundred years later, only one work attributed to de Vos is known to remain - a haunting winter scene, At the Edge of a Wood, which hangs over the bed of a wealthy descendant of the original owner. An Australian grad student, Ellie Shipley, struggling to stay afloat in New York, agrees to paint a forgery of the landscape, a decision that will haunt her.

The Sellout: A Novel

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.

Nobody's Fool

Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.

The Noise of Time

In May 1937, a man in his early 30s waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now, and few who are taken to the Big House ever return.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

Extraordinary things happen when we harness the power of both the brain and the heart. Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, living with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor.

Publisher's Summary

From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, The Ministry of Special Cases casts a powerful spell. In the heart of Argentina's Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won't accept him, strives for a wife who forever saves him, and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence - and denies a checkered history that only Kaddish holds dear.

Nathan Englander's first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, and the nature of truth itself, all take shape according to a corrupt government's whims, one man, one spectacularly hopeless man, fights to overcome his history and his name - and, if for only once in his life, to put things right.

The Ministry of Special Cases, like Englander's stories before it, is a celebration of our humanity, in all its weakness and, despite that, hope.

What the Critics Say

"This is a staggeringly mature work, gracefully and knowledgeably set in a milieu far from the author's native New York....Four p's best describe this work: poignant, powerful, political, and yet personal." (Booklist) "The fate of Argentina's Jews during the 1976-83 'Dirty War' is depicted with blistering emotional intensity in this startling first novel....Englander's story collection promised a brilliant future, and that promise is here fulfilled beyond all expectations." (Kirkus Reviews)"An amazing amalgam of wit and heart-stopping suspense, with a cast of characters I fell in love with." (Nora Ephron)

If you could sum up The Ministry of Special Cases in three words, what would they be?

Powerful, Painful, and Real. Real, despite that this story is fiction, almost alternative history.

Who was your favorite character and why?

There were no "likable" characters. My favorite character was the protagonist, Kaddish Poznan. He is an underdog, since before his birth to the end of the story. He never wins or even ties. Kaddish is well depicted as a strong man who always picks himself up and keeps going, even when going is the wrong thing to do. He is hard to like, but easy to hope for.

Have you listened to any of Arthur Morey’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

this is my first.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

The story is too long for 1 sitting and too complex and difficult. I needed time between each 1 to 3 hours of listening to process what I had heard and fit it into what I had felt about the previous narrative.

Any additional comments?

A working knowledge of the era of Argentina's "disappeared" and of orthodox Judaism is helpful when listening to this story.

I found this book difficult to understand in audio format. Perhaps, if I had the printed version in front of me and could move slower, it would have been easier. But the combination of unfamiliar names and culture made it difficult to follow over headphones.